RIAA Kills Yet Another Music Platform
Posted on December 18, 2008
By Joe Miller |
Techcrunch just reported that yet another online music sharing service, Mixwit, is going out of business.
In the book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, Lawrence Lessig describes big media’s attempts to, not just increase its overall footprint, but to ensure that its content is the only content. By essentially bribing Congress to continually increase copyright terms–effectively violating the Constitution, which provides that Congress shall grant limited terms for copyrights–record companies continue to stifle creativity by preventing anyone else from building upon their works. In Eldred v. Ashcroft, the Supreme Court sided with Congress’s copyright extensions.
It sounds good on its face, says Lessig, we intuitively believe that protecting copyrights is laudable. But in reality, big media companies like Disney got their start by building upon the works of others (the story of Cinderella, for example, was first published in 1634). It is only now that the internet has made consumers viable competitors to big media that big media and large record companies want to continually extend their copyright terms, thereby protecting their oligopoly.
In the context of record companies, Lessig explains that, when cassettes were in vogue, the record companies didn’t really care if people shared mix tapes with each other. Despite what record companies would have us believe, music sharing has not caused them to lose as much money as they tell us and there are better balancing mechanisms that could be implemented to promote creativity and to protect intellectual property, rather than making it a zero-sum game.
Nevertheless, now that the modern equivalent of mix tapes is easily available via the internet, the RIAA has successfully lobbied to put online music startups out of business, either by attempting to charge these companies up the wazoo for performance royalties, as it is doing with Pandora, or simply suing them for billions of dollars, above and beyond the damages that even WorldCom had to pay ($100 million) for screwing over its shareholders.
If you don’t have time to read Lessig’s book, I urge you to check out his Ted Conference presentation:
